


Lobster Shell

by jdmara



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Clothed Sex, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Mild Voyeurism, Oral Sex, Royal Marine Corsetry, Sex Crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:34:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29295987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdmara/pseuds/jdmara
Summary: For the Terror Rarepair Week 2021 prompt "Lost and found" and the Irvday2021 prompt "spyglass".John felt his breath flutter in his throat as he saw Tozer’s hands part the brilliant red fabric of the coat. The lamplight illuminated it bloodred, and made all Tozer’s skin look as if he were formed whole from solid gold.
Relationships: John Irving/Solomon Tozer
Comments: 24
Kudos: 38
Collections: John Irving Birthday Week 2021, The Terror Rarepair Week 2021





	Lobster Shell

**Author's Note:**

> happy 206th birthday to lt john irving. enjoy getting ravished by a big handsome marine.

Whatever thoughts had previously taken up residence in John Irving’s mind flew away as he rounded the corner to where he knew the marines bedded down. He had been heading there to ask something of Sergeant Tozer, he was sure of it, but all those notions had disappeared now, replaced with only a single image. The very same sergeant was indeed there, standing by his hammock, unbuttoning his uniform coat with his very broad hands. Getting ready to rest, surely, after finishing his watch duty. John felt his breath flutter in his throat as he saw Tozer’s hands part the brilliant red fabric of the coat. The lamplight illuminated it bloodred, and made all Tozer’s skin look as if he were formed whole from solid gold. It was all very exposed, the way all the marines and crew dressed and undressed and slept, and it seemed very small wonder to John that the marines were predisposed to pack bonding and loyalty.

As the bright red coat parted, John could see from where he was rooted firmly to the ground something very curious. Over his pale shirt was something velvety brown that John could not at first comprehend, cinching the sergeant’s waist into a more slender, angular silhouette. John’s brain stuttered and started, and he could feel a burning heat rising up under the skin of his cheeks. A work corset, of some sort, it must be, he reasoned desperately, to match the handsome cut of Tozer’s uniform coat. John flexed his fingers and then clenched them in a fist. A wild, animal part of him wanted desperately to see it in full, to see how it clasped shut. Sergeant Tozer’s waist, still partially hidden by the red coat, looked so like how John imagined a woman’s must, under her skirts, if he cared to imagine such things, which he didn’t.

Tozer went to move the coat from his shoulders and John must have made a noise, some unbidden thing from his throat, he must have, because Tozer looked up. He met John’s eyes with his own dark ones, at a distance, and John felt his face must be flushed as brightly red as Tozer’s coat. An acidic sensation burned sharply in his throat, and he turned smartly on his heel and fled the fo’c’sle before Tozer’s mouth could spread into one of those broad smiles he’d seen him give his subordinates or that dark-haired steward that was always hanging off Tozer’s every word. John knew he could not survive such a smile. His nails bit into his palms, joints quaking. 

Safely back in his bedcabin, the door firmly slid shut, John carefully unclenched his fists, dislodging his nails from the meat of his palms as he pressed his back against the wall. He rubbed his hands against the thighs of his trousers, feeling the fabric beneath his fingers. Leaning his head back to connect with the wall, he let out a long breath, and then again. It was hardly of any use. John felt as though his skin were a vise, clamping down too tight on his muscles and bones, and his layers of clothing itched over top. He found he was sweating when he brought his fingertips to his lip, his nose. 

John began to shed layers, dropping article after article of clothing on the floor until he was clad in nothing at all. He stood there, nude for a moment alone in his cramped quarters, before, overcome, he scrambled for his nightshirt, pulling it over his head, feeling it drop around his thighs. He then sat on his bed, one hand resting on the Bible on his desk. He ran one finger over the spine, caressing it. The cover was soft and worn from being cracked open many a night for fervent study. John considered opening it now, fingering through the pages to some well-loved verse and murmuring it in hushed tones, but let his hand drop away. It felt profane to seek comfort and familiarity in holy verse when his mind was submerged in the murky depths of things of which he dared not speak. 

Heavy footfalls sounded outside his door and his head snapped up. John knew not how long he had sat there, mind askew. The footsteps drew closer, and then stopped. Most likely Mr. Gibson had come to assist him with things he’d already done in some sort of tight-skinned frenzy. He’d have to see him off. John sighed and went to stand, when the door slid open, and the man who stepped through was certainly not Mr. Gibson. Instead, Sergeant Tozer stood there, not quite as tall but twice as broad, clad in his bright red uniform, buttoned up again. A shame, John thought, and then crushed that under his heel. Tozer cast a glance down at the articles of clothing scattered on the floor before lazily moving his eyes over to John, who was suddenly stiff as a board in his nightshirt, incredibly conscious of his lack of underthings. Tozer’s eyes traced over John, the seconds seeping by like a slow-oozing wound, and then he slid the door shut. John started at the sound.

“Heard you lost something, sir,” Tozer said, pulling something out of his pocket that John was simply incapable of perceiving, as sharply reminded as he was that Tozer was wearing stays under that finely shaped coat of his, keeping his waist narrow and his back steady. Tozer set whatever it was down on John’s desk with a thunk and then leaned into John’s personal space. 

“Saw you looking, lieutenant,” he said simply, breath hot against John’s ear. “Did you like what you saw?” John’s fingers fisted in his sheets, and he pushed himself backward away from the sergeant, whose face was set in a leering smirk. It did not detract from his handsomeness, however, as it might on a lesser man. At the question, John could not stop his eyes from training first on Tozer’s waist, then on his broad, rough hands. John was suddenly keenly aware of the fact that there was only one thin layer of fabric between the world and his aching nether region.

“No,” he responded stupidly, and then screwed up his face. Tozer chuckled, and then pressed in closer, putting a knee up on the bed. John could not back up any farther. The wall simply would not give. He tugged down his nightshirt with one hand desperately.

“I think you did,” Tozer replied, and then, horror of all horrors, moved in languidly and pressed his mouth to John’s when John opened his lips to respond. Tozer’s mouth was very warm, John observed, as if a great distance from his own body, and his lips soft, and quite wet within when Tozer pressed his tongue into John’s mouth. His mouth tasted like tobacco and salt, and John, head clear of thoughts, pressed into it reciprocally.

“Don’t you worry,” said Tozer, pulling away from the kiss. John gasped at the loss. “I’ve been looking too.” Tozer grinned wickedly and put his hands on John’s waist, sitting him up properly against the wall, before putting his hands on John’s thighs and rucking up the nightshirt. Then his hand was on John’s prick, and visions of damnation, of hellfire, flashed before John’s eyes when he screwed them shut. His eyes snapped open, and instead he watched the long red line of Tozer’s clothed arm, moving under his white nightshirt as Tozer felt up his prick.

“That’s quite a weapon you’ve got there,” Tozer said, and squeezed. John let out a sound like a wounded animal. He could feel himself dribbling from the tip, as he often was when he awoke from a particularly fraught dream, but he had never before laid hands upon himself like this. Tozer gave him a stroke with one large hand, from root to tip, and then ran his thumb over the top. He pulled his hand away and sucked his thumb into his mouth, taking of John and ingesting it into himself. John nearly spilled at the sight of it.

“Perhaps,” John forced out instead, every word a test, “you ought to take your coat off, sergeant.” Tozer furrowed his brow at the suggestion, thumb still in his mouth. “So you do not befoul it.” John put his hands on the buttons at Tozer’s breast, as if to convince him. If he was going to plunge into sodomy and sin, he wanted to see that corset again, and in full this time.

Tozer shrugged, and brought his hand over John’s at his chest and began unbuttoning, faster than John could have done it. John watched greedily, his mouth open and wet, as Tozer peeled back his brilliant coat. Underneath, his shoulders were no less broad, his arms carved from powerful shapes. The line of his neck under his curling hair was robust and thick, and John suddenly wanted to set his mouth to it. Finally John’s eyes came to the corset. It was no beautiful fancy thing for a highborn lady, John thought feverishly. He wore plainly but elegantly constructed whalebone stays, and as John brought his hand forward to feel the simple material, it no longer struck him as something a woman might wear at all. Sergeant Tozer, cinched in as he was, looked quite manly indeed. All the pulsing blood in his head rushed southward and he made a desperate, wanting noise, scrabbling at the side of Tozer’s corset. Tozer smiled broadly, hung his jacket over the back of John’s chair, and at last moved back in again. 

“Not so different from a girl, you are,” Tozer murmured, pushing up the hem of John’s nightshirt to look at his bony frame. “Apart from a few very large key differences.” His eyes flicked up from John’s prick to look John in the eyes, just for a searing moment, and then moved in. Instead of meeting his bruising lips again, though, he ducked down, down, down, and put his head under John’s nightshirt like he would a woman’s skirts, John imagined, head spinning, and — John gasped. 

Sergeant Tozer, one thick red-clad leg up on John’s cramped bed, took John’s prick into his wide mouth, so wet and warm. His mouth did not, or perhaps could not, take John all the way to the root, and so he instead held the base with one rough-skinned palm as his head bobbed, his mouth moving along the length. His other palm pressed against John’s hipbone. John gripped one of Tozer’s shoulders helplessly, mouth hanging open. His hand slid down Tozer’s back until he met the edge of the corset. He stared at it as Tozer’s mouth moved. It had buckles on the back, not lacing. John wondered, eyes wide and unblinking, touching the topmost buckle, his hips jerking up into Tozer’s mouth, who buckled him into the corset every day. Could he do it himself? Did he and his red-coated comrades help each other out? The idea was faintly, strangely arousing to John, and he could feel his length pulsing and weeping inside Tozer’s mouth. Or...or did that little dark-haired steward...outside of his own duties, with his adept and slender fingers… The impropriety of it. John thrust once, twice, hard into the wet cave of Tozer’s mouth, and spent messily. 

Tozer pulled his head out from under John’s nightshirt, a line of fluid drooling lazily down his chin. John was distantly aware that his eyes were burning and his cheeks were wet. There was a ringing in his ears, and the whole of reality seemed gauzy, as if he could tear through it with a swipe of his hand. Tozer swung his other leg up onto the bed and knelt before John, his thick fingers deftly unbuttoning and opening his trousers to reveal a thick red cock, near as red as the uniform he was still for the most part wearing, jutting proudly outward. Not as long as his own, now wet and softening between his legs, as far as John’s bleary eyes could tell, but tremendously thick.

Tozer spat into his hand a great amount of what John was now sure was his own seminal fluid. “On your stomach, now, sir,” he said, and manhandled John’s thin waist with his free hand to get him moving into position. John scrambled, rotating his body until he was flat on his stomach facing the wall, oversensitive softening prick pressed against his sheets. He felt a sense of the ridiculous whenever Tozer called him sir — Tozer did fall beneath him in rank, but in his hot little room it seemed more like Tozer was reminding him that he was not, in fact, in control here. 

“We shouldn’t,” he finally remembered to protest. “Mr. Gibson will come by soon, and…”

“Mr. Gibson,” he heard Tozer, almost mockingly, say from behind him, “is otherwise engaged. Saw him heading down to the hold. He’ll be busy a while yet.” John’s flurried thoughts could barely process the implication. Mr. Gibson, down in the hold? He couldn’t be meeting that sneaky little —

A warm hand reached between his legs, crushing his train of thought to atoms, and slicked them with the mass of spit and semen, and then Tozer bullied them together with his thick thighs, and something pressed between his own slender ones, hot and thick. Tozer’s cock.

The forceful thrust of it brought it against John’s own soft cock, which made a valiant effort to stand again, but John was spent, and so it simply leaked all over the sheets. Tozer gripped John’s thin waist tight enough to bruise and hammered his hips home again and again, driving a brutal pace between John’s thighs. Every impact against his prick and stones punched a weak noise out of John, a little “oh, oh, oh…” and Tozer’s voice answered in kind, a low moan torn out of his throat.

It seemed either an eternity or an instant later, so liquid was time, that Tozer let out one final moan, much too loud, and spent all over John’s arse and thighs. John could see, if he strained to look over his shoulder, Tozer reaching for his coat, softening cock still hanging out against the red wool of his trousers. He pulled from the pocket with a flourish a kerchief, and set about gently but efficiently wiping John clean of spend, extra careful as he went over John’s still sensitive genitals. Tozer then maneuvered himself off John’s bed and stood, tucking himself back inside his trousers and shrugging on his coat. John rolled over on his back and sat up, savoring every last glimpse of Sergeant Tozer standing in his bedcabin in a corset and shirtsleeves, before Tozer at last buttoned his coat back up, looking barely more rumpled than he had been at the start of this encounter. 

“Next time,” Tozer said, doing up the last button, “I’ll bring some oil, and have you properly.” He slouched against the wall, dark eyes still blown out, as if he were taking in John, memorizing him for some dirty fantasy in his hammock later.

“Next time?” John replied weakly. Tozer smirked at that. 

“And you’ll call me Solomon,” he said, opening the door. “Sir,” he added, an afterthought.

“Solomon,” John repeated dumbly. Sergeant Tozer nodded, then wiped his chin clean of the last of John’s spend with the back of his hand, flashed John one last wide and brilliant grin, and exited his bedcabin, sliding the door shut behind him. John watched him go, bright red tails of his coat sweeping behind him, and then flopped back down on his bed with a gust of breath. His mind was fogged and stretched thin from all that had occurred.

“Solomon,” he said again, murmured reverently, and turned his face to look at the Bible on his desk. Atop it, though he had not processed Tozer placing it there before, was John’s brass spyglass he had lent out to Tozer a fortnight ago. He let out a soft, wheezy laugh. Of course. That was why he had gone to find Tozer in the first place. John reached out to touch it, run his fingers down its length, and then let his hand drop away, pulled his sheets up, and attempted to let sleep take him, though he knew he would be awake for a long while yet, cheeks wet, contemplating the idea of a “next time” with Sergeant Solomon Tozer.

**Author's Note:**

> [the historical tidbit that inspired this fic](https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/71381.html)
> 
> [the inspiration for the specific corset tozer wears in this fic](https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2013/07/09/suck-it-in-purser-thomas-chews-corse/)
> 
> i have thought of nothing but corset tozer for over two weeks since i first saw [a tweet](https://twitter.com/halfcharacter/status/1352766469327757314) about it and now i have inflicted it on john, and all of you as well.
> 
> share on [tumblr](https://jdmara.tumblr.com/post/642589172589346816/lobster-shell-2746-words-by-showmethebeefy) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/TheJDMara/status/1358894270351081473?s=20)


End file.
